The National Indie Excellence Awards emphasize a synergy of form and content in judging their award winners. My book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times delivers its message through its 200 images, as much as its text delivers its ideas - a synergy of form and content. So I was thrilled to be selected for its Excellence Award for both Arts and Entertainment as well as Cover Design.

As a former documentary filmmaker for NBC News, I had to find a telling image that conveyed the essence of the information that I scripted. In covering foreign cultures or national issues, I realized how important shape is in downloading the world into order and meaning. Shape itself can be a symbol that tells us the thinking, the mental map, of the culture that built a circular settlement, a pyramid, a town square, a roundabout or a downtown grid. These very shapes reflect whether a society is based on equality or hierarchy, on qualities or quantities, on flow or fixed places.

National awards for Indie books are especially welcomed as independent publishing, from university presses to hybrid publishing, are rising dramatically while traditional publishers are merging and shrinking. The more ideas that are shared, the stronger the society. Thanks to awards such as this, merit can still be recognized even within a system where all can enter. I am grateful to the National Indie Excellence Award judges for the difference their recognition makes for independent writers and excited to be recognized for excellence.

Another happy surprise. My book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times won another Gold book award. Next Generation Indie Book Awards will celebrate its winners in a Washington, DC ceremony in June. This Gold adds to the Gold from Nautilus Book Awards. It is gratifying that the book’s ideas and images on our search for pattern and meaning have found their way into the minds of readers.

Images are the dominant language of our time. Visual processing takes up 30% of the brain’s function. It is the first and foremost way we take in the world. The 200 images in this book reveal how humans throughout time, from migratory to modern living, have made sense of the world through shape. So it is particularly fitting that this Gold award is for the category of Coffee Table Book/Photography. The eyes are our portal and pathway. Yet, the way we see and understand the world shifts at pivot points in history.

Pattern recognition is a buzz word of our data processing age. Yet pattern recognition is what humans have always done, ordering the world through shape, from stone circles, to pyramids, to helices and networks.

May images of the circle dances in tribal societies, the skyscrapers of modern cities, the helix of DNA and the links and nodes of networks seep into your eyes and show you how we shape our world, then how that shape, shapes us.

The idea for a book often aligns with a point in time, a story or observation that inspired it. Yet the process of writing a book is more porous than simply a beginning and an end. The Telling Image brewed in me for decades before its publication. After the physical book was in stores and at conferences and in the hands of readers, it still was not in its final stage. The book is simply the suitcase of the multiple ideas that are enclosed. And those ideas embed uniquely in each reader. So a book begins, not ends, at publication. It is never ‘finished’, as its ideas have thousands of carriers in those who read the book.

I was deeply gratified that my book was recognized by the Nautilus Book Awards with a Gold Award for The Creative Process. This felt particularly wonderful to me, as it was a long and meandering thought process that led it from field to field until I found an encompassing way to speak of many things – how we see, how we think, organize, find pattern and meaning – and how the very answers to these questions shift at major transition points in history.

The Nautilus Awards recognize books in many genres that nurture positive change. It aims for Better Books for a Better world. And it combs the world to find the ideas bubbling in all categories, from 36 states and a dozen other nations. We need this kind of harvester in our world. One that looks for the best expression of our highest aims.

Writing is a solitary process. It often feels like a spider throwing out its silk thread without knowing whether it will reach and attach to any destination. It is an act of faith. So it is with great gratitude to Nautilus Book Awards that I can smile knowing that the thread of ideas I flung out to the world was so graciously received.

Maybe not. Air space, air quality, and aerial views are subject to ownership, pollution, and obstruction today.

When space exploration began, we felt a thrill seeing Earth as a whole sphere. Consciously and unconsciously, this created the sense that humans are bound together on this planet in common consequences. But our own human nature doesn’t fully understand our interconnectedness. Space exploration became the space race.

When the first satellites went up, bringing us images of weather patterns and ocean currents that played supra roles in the drama of nations, we received a larger context. I was hopeful that these images, beyond rhetoric and beyond political philosophies, could create a unifying awareness of our fragility and need for cooperation.

My wish was that a space perspective would engender a set of laws between nations creating a common purpose girded by space law. Like admiralty law controls how the oceans are governed— accommodating for navigation, fishing rights, territorial waters—I believed we could evolve to develop more comprehensive, more beneficial principles to oversee space.

It was particularly painful to see my dream die.

First China shot down its own satellite to demonstrate that they could—and to show they might use that power against others as well. The USA and Russia have done the same. And now India joins that pack. In March 2019, India shot down its own satellite.

Last week India shot down a satellite. The U.S. says the debris created threatens the International Space Station pic.twitter.com/JDVhClWjHb

Think of the debris from each of these smatterings. The pieces of the blasted satellites will float on and on. There are no vacuum cleaners in space. Obstacles are dancing around the same orbit in which the space station and working satellites fly.

What strikes me about this bullet to my dream is that blowing up a satellite is not conquering territory in the classic sense. It is destroying another country’s ability to communicate. The life or death of information and communication are now more vital than citizens’ life and death.

When I think about military history, information lines were always a critical target, from capturing runners to blowing up bridges to encryption messages. So maybe it is only the technology that has changed, not the way we proceed. Maybe the costumes of our offenses and defenses have changed, but not the narrative of the play we call history. Still, it hit me like a thud, that the wild blue yonder does not belong to everyone.

As a documentary filmmaker, I traveled the globe seeking the answer to one question: How do humans make sense of the world? From Abu Dhabi to Cuba to Liberia, I had to find a telling image that summed up a story. I found a key hiding in plain sight. It was shape itself.

Praise for The Telling Image:

Lavishly illustrated and thought-provoking, The Telling Image should appeal to anyone interested in the world of ideas and the shapes that reflect them.

— Blue Ink Review

Lois Farfel Stark’s The Telling Image is a wondrous and sweeping book that accomplishes a seemingly impossible task: making sense of the history—and future—of humanity and the universe.

— Foreword Review

Lois Stark’s committed intelligence brings pictures and stories to life and enables people to see and interpret the world with an enlightened perspective that is increasingly rare in this fragmented and scattered society. Watching her ‘connect the dots’ is a great learning experience. Stark brings words and pictures full of common sense but confronting the most complex challenges. She presents ideas of extraordinary value to artists, businessmen, and scientists

— Barry Munitz, former president and CEO, The J. Paul Getty Trust

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December is a time when we celebrate light piercing through the darkness. In the winter we experience more lightless hours. And December is the time when the counting of days ends and begins, like the moment a tide reverses, rolling back to sea.

Christmas celebrates Jesus’ birth, announced by the brightest star in the sky. The star oriented the wise men. It literally oriented them to the manger and symbolically orients the world to a new way of seeing—a new guiding light. We learn to recognize that we are connected to and have an impact on each other in every small gesture.

Chanukah is also a festival of lights. The light in this story is the miracle of a lamp with a tiny supply of oil lasting eight nights. Like the lamp, our daily lives leave us feeling as if we’ve exhausted our last reservoir. We learn to expand the resources deep within us and muster strength to see us through personal darkness despite improbable odds.

Animals instinctually know how to prepare for winter. Bears find caves to hibernate. Chipmunks burrow in holes underground. Even termites close off air tubes in their complex sand structures. What do we do? Besides upping the thermostat and wrapping our necks with woolen scarves, we also soak in light to store in our inner selves. We seek out the guiding star to navigate our lives, or we reach deeply within.

Light has other strange properties. Our eyes perceive a stream of light but when we reach out, we cannot touch it. We see light only when it touches other things like reflections on the moon or specks of dust in the air seen from the light of a movie projector in a dark room. We live in a time of many kinds of light. Campfires, torches, whale oil and kerosene lamps from days of old are now new kinds of light—laser, electrical, nuclear, incandescent or fluorescent, sulfur lamps or neon lights.

What takes us out of darkness physically? What illuminates spiritually? Light is the beam that reveals what it lands on. It fills the air but we see its effects, what it lands on becomes aware to our eyes or our technology sensors. Like enlightenment, like love, like peace, we sense it when it lands on us.

This is the season to notice where the light lands. This is the season to be a source of light.

I am very pleased to share with you the cover for my new book, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times. This book has been ten years in the making. As many of my friends can attest, these ideas have been swirling with me since my years as a documentary filmmaker for NBC News. During my travels, I was trained to look for the telling image—a picture that gives the essence of the story. In covering countries in times of tension and transition, I had to look through other people’s eyes to learn how they saw the world. I filmed in Abu Dhabi before the United Arab Emirates were unified, in Cuba ten years after their revolution, in Northern Ireland when their religious conflict burst into urban warfare, and in Liberia covering its social split.

While history gives us versions of a story, a telling image has the power to tap a deeper understanding. I practiced seeing with new eyes, open to take in the unfamiliar and to discover clues to another culture’s worldview. Dropping into a foreign country and trying to understand it enough to present its various factions, historic background, and current controversy was daunting and humbling. I knew I needed to lasso the topics at play, and I knew I would never know everything. One approach I took was to step back and look at the situation with the largest lens, seeing all sides, noticing the geography that influenced the culture’s way of living, and learning the historic background. I had to find an image that could relay the issues and emotions, the culture and landscape, in a way that could convey more than words can explain.

Searching for the telling image of a story, I found one, hiding in plain sight. It was shape itself. Once I looked for shape, I saw it everywhere—in shelters, social systems, and sacred sites. From indigenous cultures to modern societies, our answers to survival, social bonding, and sacred symbols differ vastly. Yet the blueprint for each culture became clear when I looked for shape.

Now you can join in my journey. I extend my thanks to my friends, colleagues, and supporters who have been there with me along the way. Without you, this book wouldn't be possible.

If you'd like to receive more updates about my book, click here to sign up for my book newsletter and get a free excerpt of the book. Or you can pre-order your copy on Amazon.

Technology's New Lens

We often don’t realize how much technology shapes our daily lives. A few decades ago, a cell phone was something out of Star Trek. But now new technologies seem less and less like science fiction and more like essential parts of our world. What we don’t realize is how much this can affect our perception.

For example, the new Nokia 8 allows you to take a picture of what is in front of you as it also records you and what is behind you. This is called a “Bothie” now adding to selfies, allowing people to take pictures forward and backwards simultaneously. The concept is simple—two lenses. But it blows open our habit of perception. Will we start to perceive like the proverbial teacher with eyes in the back of her head?

3-D printing is another way of seeing in new ways. It incorporates a full-sphere visual of the object being replicated. The blueprint of a hand tool can be sent to the International Space Station, where a 3-D printer creates the tool for astronauts to use. This cuts down on payloads launched and allows for devices to be created as they are needed. But it wouldn’t be possible without the technology that allows us to see in multiple dimensions. Inside the space station, astronauts float and summersault to move about. They tether themselves to a spot with a foot latch to anchor themselves to a place on the cylinder-shaped interior walls. Without gravity, our way of seeing the world changes. When the first crew left earth they were astounded by the sight of our Earth from outer space, it allowed them to see our world in new ways.

Even healthcare is rearranging. Robotic assists during medical surgery become a 360-degree eye that can image the space around and under the bones, nerves, tissues, muscles, and organs being operated on.

These new ways of recording, seeing, moving, working upend our basic assumptions. We can feel unmoored, as dizzyingly adrift as an astronaut floating in space. The ability to see all around us at once will be an acquired perception, much like a blind person suddenly given sight needs to learn to distinguish the depth of fields, the outline of forms. Add virtual reality to these multiple lenses, and the job of making sense out of what is real or imagined, what is forward or back, or what is in around the corner, requires a major adjustment in our senses and how we make sense of the world. The question is: What will you do with this new sight?

Predicting the future sounds like the power of a super hero. But in early Aztec and Babylonian cultures, priests held the knowledge to do just that. Take for example, the total solar eclipse. Priests received the wonder of their flock for being able to chart the skies—something we consider now a natural science. The trick of magic is knowing where the secret actually is—up a sleeve, in a hat, coming out of a scarf.

In the case of the total solar eclipse, the magic of coincidence mounts. It is not only that the moon enters the path of the sun. The relative size and position of the sun and the moon also matter. The moon is four hundred times smaller than the sun, but it floats four hundred times nearer to Earth. From a certain spot on our globe, the smaller moon can then entirely cover the larger sun to the viewer on Earth.

This is a coincidence in our notion of time and space. But in a few hundred million years, total solar eclipses will be over forever. The moon has been moving away from us at a rate of one and a half inches per year, since its birth four billion years ago. What we see in the sky the as the total eclipse will be but a memory, a chance encounter that can either change our perception of the world or simply pass us by.

How easy it must have been for early cultures to believe that the sun revolves around the Earth. Like early humans, we too experience our day as starting with sunrise and ending at sunset. But we know now the opposite is true, that the Earth revolves around the sun.

The sun rises in the morning and the moon appears at night, two fixed points of reality—daylight and moonlight. Sure as can be, the world must be divided by twos. But this perspective changes when you’re in space. An astronaut sees a whole new reality—a system with moving parts. From a space ship there are 16 sunrises in 24 hours.

We are a part of a solar system that is a part of the Milky Way. How grand and beautiful it feels to see the whole splay of stars in the sky from a rural area on a cloudless night. You know where you are. But hold on. We are part of a galaxy that is one of two trillion galaxies. I repeat, two trillion, so far and still counting. Put your mind around it. You cannot. It’s more than we can fully comprehend. Yet it does quicken our appreciation that whatever answers we have are partial answers to ever larger possibilities.

You’ve heard about trying to put square pegs into round holes. The message is they don’t fit. It’s one of the first games young children are taught—how to distinguish a circle from a square from a triangle. Once we learn this way of seeing, we tend to categorize. We determine the shape of things and figure out what fits where. As useful as this lesson is, it sticks so deeply that we forget there’s more than one way to see things, more than one approach to a problem, more than one way to write an equation.

In today’s world, visual information outranks text. Animations can show us dimensional fields. With 3-D printing machines, children can easily imagine multiple dimensions. So let’s teach them how what seems impossible is possible with a new way of thinking, and that there can be multiple correct answers to a question.

Have you ever looked at photograph of a human face upside down? It takes awhile for our eyes to process through our brain, to even be sure it is a face, much less a face we know. Our automatic recognition of the world is keyed to frame and name the familiar.

Today’s world can seem upside down. Accelerated change has made it almost impossible to find a fixed point that is not in flux. The shape of cities will alter as we go from cars we drive to cars that drive themselves. Drones multiply our capacities to see with 360 degree vision, both from above the landscape and within buildings .Think of astronauts floating in the space station, with no up nor down, somersaulting rather than walking. We relearn how to orient, how to pattern, while it’s all in motion.

Henry Ford said if he had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses. If Steve Jobs had asked us, we could not have imagined icons that lead us to draw on a computer, icons that let us shop on a cell phone. So let’s be clear. Since we are in motion, since the new can come to us from any angle, we must start to see like a floating astronaut, alert in all directions.

Familiar patterns are coming to us upside down. Dylan the musician gave a concert in England in 1965 where the first half was his popular folksong style. The second half burst open with an electric band, full of unfamiliar sounds, that are now classics, such as Tell Me How Does It Feel from the song Like a Rolling Stone. Food is in fusion, from IndoChine to Tex Mex. Family systems now come in multiple combinations, as well as gender. It feels like a blend, a potpourri, but eventually fresh forms become their own new selves, like jazz, where African beats become American blues.

More voices are being heard today by more people than ever before. By voices I mean musicians, writers from all cultures, tech creations from drones to genomics.It is the age of participation, of networking, of the inane and the incredible in the same mix.It can disorient, seem raw, but also freshly intriguing, up to each of us to discern the pattern in unfamiliar terms, like recognizing a face upside down.

Desks have long been the home of the mind: an intimate space where you figure out what you think. Desk spaces have changed through the years to accommodate different styles and types of work, and the recent trend toward co-working also represents a change in the nature of the workplace. You can now rent workspaces around the world with funky furniture, pool tables, rock-climbing walls, and free wine. In London, people even rent chairs at their dining-room table by the hour—an attractive alternative to those living in small apartments who are tired of working in coffeehouses.

Amelia Earhart intrigues me not only for her guts and goals, not only for her courage to grab her own life and live it in her own terms, but for her eyes--her sight and foresight. She was a visionary who wanted to push the horizon of women, of aviation, and literally expand her horizon by seeing from above. As the first female to fly the Atlantic in 1928, first as a passenger and later as a solo pilot in 1932, she was the emblem of an emerging new world. She flew the Pacific solo from Honolulu to Oakland in 1935 when few people flew airplanes, man or woman. Her accomplishments broke norms, challenged reality in her times like the first astronauts of our times.

But what I love about Earhart is how she used her eyes--as a visionary that pushed the envelope, as a pilot and navigator who flew solo over oceans, as an amateur photographer, and as a poet, who transmuted her sight into words.

I think of desks as the home of the mind. In many particular ways, desks are the portals where ideas birth into art or action. I’m not proud to say it but mine is a mess. If our desks give us a glimpse of our thought process, I’m hoping my organized chaos implies spontaneity and invention, along with disorder. In my travels over the last few years, I’ve stood near the desks of Ernest Hemingway, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Mahatma Gandhi. Places carry their own power. They make us remember; they stimulate senses and ideas.

What can we learn about the mindset of these particular world figures just by seeing their desks?

In my latest Quartz article, I explore the childhood landscape of presidents. I was born on the flatland of Houston where the sky was open in all directions, with no obstacles to climb, no blocked views. How did your childhood landscape shape you?

In my solo tent, under the night sky I was alone in the Colorado woods, during a leadership workshop. I looked to the night sky as my bedtime reading. Seeing the Big Dipper, I was immediately oriented. By finding north from the Dipper, I then knew south, east, and west off the North Star. I could find my place, thanks to the Dipper.

So needed, so sure is the image of a Dipper, it’s easy to forget the Dipper is in my mind, not the night sky. Before the Dipper was our automatic pilot, the same stars were seen by other cultures, in other centuries, on their own terms.

To Native Americans, these same stars connected to form a Bear. Early Greeks knew north from this cluster of stars as a Wagon. The Chinese drew a Heavenly Emperor to remember the stars. We can remember things by associating them with the familiar. But all too often we get stuck in thinking the familiar is the only answer. The stars do not change. Only the map in our mind changes.

Many of us learned the periodic table of elements as a grid, lined up in rows of stacked straight lines to give us a familiar order. It’s easy to think of the elements as locked in a grid. Yet the same sequence of chemicals can also be drawn as a helix, or sequenced twirling in loops, or organized in a torus, the shape of a donut. The sequence stays the same no matter the format. The grid is not in nature; the grid is in our mind.

What could be more absolute than the sun rising each morning? Yet to the astronaut in a space station, orbiting the Earth, there are sixteen sunrises in twenty-four hours. The eternal constants of nature do not change. We change our perspective, and the picture changes. The very thing we understood as absolute, changes to a partial piece of a larger scheme.

What could be more absolute than numbers? We are familiar with calculating by tens. Yet other number systems use bases of two or twelve or sixty. Other systems give the same answer to a problem, but arrive at it through another model.

The cluster of stars, the sequence of chemical elements, the morning sun, or numbers all give ways to know the universe. These formations and formulations work. They point us in the right direction, unveil sequence, give us daily rhythm, and open the invisible world of numbers. They give us pattern we can rely on.

But there is another lesson within the sureness of these answers. Remember: these are our impositions, our templates, our models. Our answers are only toeholds to ever-larger truths. We fight wars, hold prejudice, picture the divine in a single way. The truths we hold most dear do not need to be dropped. They can grow as we grow. We still use the number ten system, even as we know there are multiple math systems, even negative numbers, even quantum realities.

We do not just live in the world, we live in our versions and views of it. Our answers can work so well for a time, we forget that there are other ways of seeing, believing, measuring. So multiply your points of view, enlarge your lens, and what looked like opposites may turn into variations on a theme.

The mission of TED talks is to spread ideas that matter. TED talks have become a vital artery is today’s world. Originally the acronym stood for Technology, Entertainment and Design, drivers of change. But the very name TED makes it friendly, like a person speaking to you, one on one. And that has remained its character through its evolution. In tone, it is a conversation from one person to another, even when the other is a global audience. In subject matter, TED Talks encompass the full spectrum of human imagination, communicated through personal passion.

So it thrills me to be able to add my voice to the chorus that endures in TED formats. My personal passion has been trying to understand how humans shape their world, and then how that shape shapes them. We can be liberated or locked by the way we order the world. We always see through a lens, even when we are not conscious of it, like a fish not knowing it is swimming in water. The best we can do is to realize our prism can become our prison, and then enlarge our lens to take in more of the world. I will be giving a TEDx Talk in Dallas, Nov 15, 2016. The press release for the event is attached. The recorded talk will be uploaded on YouTube by the middle of December 2016. I welcome you to gather round the fire of TED’s global circle.

***HIDDEN SHAPES CLUE US TO HOW THE WORLD WORKS, WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

Stark, who was a producer and writer of documentary specials for NBC network and has created over 40 documentaries, filming in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Cuba as well as throughout the U.S., will explain this concept in a TEDx Talk at SMU in Dallas on November 12, 2016 titled “Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight.”

Her November 12 TEDx talk will examine how shape reveals the mindset of cultures through time and provides cues to our future. Illustrated with a series of captivating photos, including originals taken by Stark, “Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight” offers a remarkable journey through time and place, from tribal ceremonies in Liberia and the pyramids of Egypt to Dubai and China -- where a hotel built in the shape of an upright ring upends all expectations.

Drawing on her experience as a filmmaker and global explorer, Stark reveals how shapes such as those of shelters, sacred sites and social systems reflect our frame of mind. Round thatched huts and labyrinths show us that migratory humans saw the world as a web. Church steeples and skyscrapers show us that urban humans viewed the world as a ladder.

“Nature does not change. Only the map in our mind changes,” Stark notes. Even the digital world holds a hidden shape. The network is the map we impose on everything. It is not just technology that develops. The very way we think shifts.

“Shape: Hiding in Plain Sight” prompts reflections on chaos becoming pattern, opposing forces becoming balance and the beauty of the big picture: how we are all connected, to nature and to each other.

A transcript and the photos are available upon request.

___About Lois StarkLois Farfel Stark is an Emmy Award-winning producer, documentary filmmaker and author of the book The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times (Greenleaf, 2017). During her distinguished career with NBC News, she produced and wrote over forty documentaries on architecture, medical research, wilderness protection, artists, and social issues. She has covered Abu Dhabi's catapult to the 20th century, the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, Cuba ten years after their revolution, the Israeli Air Force in the Six Day War, Northern Ireland during its time of religious conflict, and Liberia's social split.

Along with an Emmy, Lois is also the recipient of two CINE Gold awards, two Gold Awards from The International Film Festival of the Americas, the Matrix Award from Women In Communications, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, and the Silver Award from the Texas Broadcasting Association. She has served as a trustee for institutions in education, health, the arts, and public service, including Sarah Lawrence College, her alma mater. She lives in Houston.

How do we humans make sense of the world? It depends on how we see the world.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was trained to look for the telling image to communicate a story. In covering Liberia or Abu Dhabi, Cuba or Northern Ireland, I had to look through other people’s eyes to learn how they saw the world. I practiced having new eyes, open to take in the unfamiliar, discovering cues to their worldview. While histories give us facts, images have the power to reach a deeper truth.

How we see is much broader than the picture in front of our eyes. We organize and orient by a mental map. We imagine inventions and novels before they come to life. Thirty percent of our brain is devoted to visual processing, the largest single function. Our time can be described as the Age of the Eye. Information comes from digital screens, virtual reality, and simultaneous uploads from opposite sides of the globe, or images from space and quantum levels showing us worlds never seen before.

My goal for this blog is to help build an awareness of our lens, to enlarge it, to multiply our points of view. Perspectives will be a recurring theme—how the way we see influences the way we think. Understanding that the Big Dipper was perceived as a Great Bear to Native Americans and what this meant. Exploring how different American Presidents have seen the world through the literal landscape of their childhood. Recognizing that one culture’s idea of justice can take the form of retribution, while in another it can come as reconciliation.